Nazi and Confederate imagery present during Oct. 15 protest of ‘Halloween Drag Story Hour’ in Jonesboro Heights; pastor calls for commissioners to enforce ‘adult entertainment’ laws
By Billy Liggett and Richard Sullins
A local pastor’s public protest of a “drag story hour” in the Jonesboro Heights area last weekend carried over into the Lee County Board of Commissioners’ meeting on Monday as his group formally asked the county to consider a ban on future drag events that propose to allow children to attend.
Thomas F. Booher, pastor of the Heritage Reformed Presbyterian Church — which meets in the fellowship hall of Swann Station Baptist Church on N.C. 87 south of Carolina Trace, just over the Harnett County line — was front and center of a small group that protested the Halloween Drag Story Hour” hosted by Sanford Yoga & Community Center in Jonesboro Heights on Oct. 15. Booher, donning a shirt and tie while carrying a Bible and portable microphone and small speaker, was flanked by a handful of masked protesters, one draped in a Confederate flag and another wearing a Neo-Nazi shirt that read, “Support Your Local Einsatzkommando,” referring to WWII Nazi killing squads responsible for the systematic murder of tens of thousands of Jews and Polish citizens.
The 38-minute protest, which Heritage Church shared a video of on its Youtube page that day, included a short sermon by Booher, followed by short statements from other protesters with a megaphone, and ended with video of officers from Sanford Police Department telling the group to leave because they lacked proper permits for their protest.
The next day, Booher was joined by his father, Thomas C. Booher, and Deborah Matthews of Sanford to speak during the public comment portion of the county commissioners meeting.
“Places of adult entertainment hosting drag shows or drag story hour for children should not be allowed a place in our community,” the elder Booher said to the board. “But sadly, Sanford is witness to those who are doing precisely that.”
THE SHOW
Pictures posted by Sanford Yoga & Community Center — which doubles as a local LGBTQ+ resource center — show a small Halloween-themed event with drag performers dressed as characters like Ahsoka from Star Wars and Ursula from The Little Mermaid. Books on display included titles like Gustavo The Shy Ghost, Creepy Carrots! and Calvin, a book about a child “who has always been a boy, even if the world sees him as a girl.”
Event organizer Lindsey Knapp, who launched the yoga center with husband Mike Knapp in 2020, called the event “harmless” and expressed concern with groups like the one on Oct. 15 who suggest these events sexualize, assault or harm children in any way.
“They attempt to dehumanize the LGBTQ+ population by calling them ‘sexual predators.’ It lays the groundwork to marginalize and justify violence after we’ve fought so hard to simply exist,” she said.
Oct. 15 wasn’t Knapp’s first run-in with protests. Nearly one year ago, on Oct. 30, 2022, about 16 members of the far-right, neo-fascist, white nationalist group the Proud Boys marched and protested outside of Hugger Mugger Brewing in downtown Sanford when it hosted a benefit Halloween Drag Brunch. The protest featured far more masked men, many bearing the “Proud Boys” name and symbols representing the group, shouted “groomers” and other remarks at attendees as they entered the event. Others held protest signs decrying “state-sponsored pedophilia.” Several protesters blocked the entrance of the brewery before being asked to clear the way by local police. One protester wore a hat that read, “Shoot Your Local Pedophile.”
The latest protest was smaller in numbers, but featured similar imagery. One of the masked participants appeared to be a child.
Asked why she continues to advertise and host drag events with the specter of protest and confrontation always looming, Knapp said she wants to continue to provide a safespace for a community that needs it.
“There are so many queer people in Sanford and Lee County, and they just don’t feel safe to be out,” she said. “We need to hold events and provide resources to show they’re safe, supported and feel loved. This community deserves to exist and live in a place free from harassment and discrimination and receive the same treatment as everyone else.”
As for the story hour, she called the event harmless.
“It was a drag performer in a room reading stories. This particular one was Halloween themed, and maybe some of the stories were arguably a little spooky, but they were not terrifying in any way. Parents were there. We made friendship bracelets, we told stories and we played games. It was a happy event. Fun and educational. Drag is performance art. These events are not sexually suggestive in any way.”
A PLEA TO THE COMMISSIONERS
Speaking before the board of commissioners on Monday, Thomas C. Booher said allowing children to see drag performers is part of “an agenda to normalize this wicked behavior in the minds of children so that their resistance to it will be minimized, [and] that there will be more and more of it so that they will practice it themselves.”
He said his aim was to see all places that allow drag entertainment to be shut down and asked for an interim measure in the form of an ordinance that would treat drag shows as it might other forms of adult entertainment, such as a strip club. He also asked that those under the age of 18 be prohibited from attending any event without exception at such locations.
Following his father to the podium, Thomas F. Booher appealed to the commissioners’ sense of morality.
“For a city, for a society and for our county here, are we going to continue to permit these things going on in our time as if it’s perfectly healthy, perfectly normal and fine?” he asked.
Sanford Police Department officers responded to the most recent protest after a call from Knapp, and Booher expressed frustration when officers said there was no reason to believe a crime was being committed during the drag event. He also criticized his lack of authority to investigate what might have been happening during the story time in the absence of any signs of a person in immediate danger.
Youtube video of the confrontation showed one of the officers explaining to the pastor that any such regulation would have to be put in place by either the city or the state legislature.
Thomas F. Booher also made note of the presence of others who came to the protest wearing Confederate and neo-Nazi symbols and told the commissioners they were not part of his group. Matthews told the commissioners she spoke as a survivor of sexual abuse when she was a child.
Speaking of the children that she observed at the Yoga Center, Matthews said, “Innocence was lost as they entered the event, and it can never be recovered.”
North Carolina General Statutes (NCGS 14-202) set out what the legislature has defined as the rules under which adult entertainment establishments may operate, and even makes an attempt to define what “adult entertainment” actually is. The statutes also provides local government with wide latitude of their own, giving them the option to regulate “the location or operation of adult establishments or other sexually oriented businesses to the extent consistent with the constitutional protection afforded free speech.”
These types of regulations that go beyond what state law requires, particularly with respect to what is permitted in a particular place, are almost always adopted by cities and towns, and Lee County Commission Chairman Kirk Smith suggested to the Heritage Church group that they consider speaking during a similar public comment period during an upcoming Sanford City Council meeting.
The group was not in attendance at the council’s Oct. 15 session.
CAUSE FOR CONCERN
While Thomas F. Booher told commissioners — and posted on Facebook — that he was not affiliated with the masked protesters who wore Confederate and neo-Nazi symbols, the scripture he quoted to begin the protest was cause for concern, according to Knapp.
Booher began with Matthew 18:6: If anyone causes one of these little ones — those who believe in me — to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea, a popular go-to verse in drag show protests across the country. An Oklahoma pastor was threatened with jail time in April after using the verse while making threats to a local LGBTQ+ group, and recently in North Carolina, a decorative millstone containing the verse was anonymously left in front of a bar in Carteret County that supports the LGBTQ+ community.
“Thomas Booher might distance himself from these groups, but he’s reading from the same playbook,” Knapp said. “We’ve received death threats before, and at least one of the people we got threats from was arrested and convicted for those threats.”
A controversial figure Booher has not distanced himself from is Robert Lewis Dabney, whose quote, “The education of children for God is the most important business done on earth,” appears on the banner of his personal Facebook page. Dabney was a 19th century theologian, Confederate Army chaplain and Southern Presbyterian pastor, in addition to biographer to Stonewall Jackson. Several conservative Presbyterian pastors today still value Dabney’s writings, much of which supported slavery and racist views toward Black people.
Dabney wrote “The Ecclesiastical Equality of Negroes” in 1868, stating his public opposition to “clerical equality” and calling for the segregation of Presbyterian churches. In letters to the Richmond Enquirer in 1851, titled “The Moral Character of Slavery,” Dabney wrote, “We must remember that the real evil is the presence of three millions of half-civilized foreigners among us; and of this gigantic evil, domestic slavery is the potent and blessed cure.”
At the Oct. 15 protest, Booher suggested his church could extend an “olive branch” to the drag event’s organizers, but said, “Clearly, that is not something that you are looking for.”
“Is it not a great hope to know that we have been made in the image of God as male and female?” Booher said during the protest. “And that there’s assurance that I can flourish as a man, as a woman, rather than go in there and confuse children’s impressionable minds. To twist them into whatever it is that you wish to contort them into. It is Satanic, it is demonic, and it needs to be stopped. And you need to stop doing this and behaving in these wicked ways.”
Knapp said the LGBTQ+ community “strives for equal rights and acceptance” and called Booher’s “threats and accusations” baseless. She said the “playbook” is similar to strategies used to justify lynchings prior to the Civil Rights era and tactics used against the Jewish community prior to WWII.
“They’re clutching pearls and talking about being worried about children, but if we were doing that in any way, we’d be arrested and thrown in jail,” she said. “Let’s call it for what it is. They’re here to incite hate and violence.”
View the video:
These guys are going at this the wrong way. I don’t agree with hate groups. Antifa, BLM, KKK, Nazi are despicable and have no room in our society. I agree that kids shouldn’t be in the same room as a drag queen parading around half naked
See the guy wearing the Einsatzkommando shirt? The slogan on it comes from the Norwegian Death Metal band Burzum founded by a guy calling himself Varg who was such a “Death Metal” fanatic (death Metal being just a thing that someone he knew made up) that he thought, to prove how hard-core he was, he should burn beautiful historic churches and kill people. So he did. Now he sells Nazi-themed shirts like that, because doing so is evil, and he wants to do evil things. Kind of like harassing and threatening people at a local yoga center just because you can.
See the guy wearing the Einsatzkommando shirt? The slogan on it comes from the Norwegian Death Metal band Burzum founded by a guy calling himself Varg who was such a “Death Metal” fanatic (death Metal being just a thing that someone he knew made up) that he thought, to prove how hard-core he was, he should burn beautiful historic churches and kill people. So he did. Now he sells Nazi-themed shirts like that, because doing so is evil, and he wants to do evil things. Kind of like harassing and threatening people at a local yoga center just because one can.
Hello all, I am the pastor that preached at this drag event. The Rant reached out to me, and I provided them with a lengthy reply which they chose not to run. In my next comment, I’ll provide my statement in its entirety. But I can also make things real simple up front — neither I nor anyone from my church support anything having to do with Nazi-ism, terrorism, or any such thing. I’ll link to our full video so you can watch what actually happened and judge for yourself. The group in masks came on their own, we handed out Gospel tracts to them, called them to repentance and faith in Christ as well. I spoke with several of them after I preached, we urged them not to use profanity, I even invited them to church if they truly wanted to trust in the Lord and serve Him, etc.
Also, neither I myself nor anyone in our church want to see anyone at the Yoga Center, or any others, physically harmed, assaulted, have acts of violence committed against them, etc., in any way.
What we do want is for them to stop grooming children into a lifestyle that is harmful to the precious children, even potentially leading to the mutilating of their own bodies as many children have done/have had done to them, when being transitioned. We also want the adults running these shows who are either allies to this lifestyle or live this lifestyle themselves, to repent, trust in Christ, and be saved from their sins, and find joy in the Lord, renewed in His image as male and female, fulfilling their glorious purpose and calling as man and woman. I preach all these things in the video.
I wonder, will those from the Yoga Center, The Rant, etc., likewise affirm that they do not wish for anyone from our church to be physically harmed, hated, or have acts of violence committed against us in any way?
When I took my kids to the beach in Thailand and they saw Thai ladyboys, my kids didn’t turn trans. They just learned a little more about the world. Maybe you should try it.
You’ve never been to Thailand. Just stop.
You are going to Hell is there is one
“The group in masks came on their own…” – Those individuals are either FBI provocateurs or ANTIFA. Their very presence unfairly casts you as an extremist. Since it was an open protest there was nothing you could do about it.
Here was my statement I provided to The Rant for this article, which they chose not to run (I expand on this and add some other things on The Rant’s Facebook page where they link to their article):
This past Sunday I went with a group from our church to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, calling all present to repent of sin and trust in Christ (including another group of masked protestors, whom we also handed out Gospel tracts to and urged not to use profanity) for salvation, which wonderfully renews us in the image of God as male and female (Genesis 1:27). Young children made in God’s image were presented and exposed to the destruction of masculinity and femininity by drag queens brought in for a paid event to read stories that promote “trans-gendering” children. One of the drag queens present has links on his social media to this page, which pictures all sorts of sexual perversion, gender confusion, and vile behavior that some call “adult entertainment”: https://www.facebook.com/boomboom.bathory
Pictured are what appears to be transgender persons who have mutilated their bodies with fake breasts and lopped off genitalia, posing partially nude at times, in sexually provocative burlesque and goth routines, with demonic attire. A drag queen of this sort read stories to precious children on Sunday at the Sanford Yoga Center, and one book that Sanford Yoga themselves showed from their own photos on Facebook is entitled “Calvin” by JR Ford. The cover pictures a child of maybe 6 or 7 years old, and the description of the book on Amazon reads:
“In this joyful and impactful picture book, a transgender boy prepares for the first day of school and introduces himself to his family and friends for the first time.
Calvin has always been a boy, even if the world sees him as a girl. He knows who he is in his heart and in his mind but he hasn’t yet told his family. Finally, he can wait no longer: “I’m not a girl,” he tells his family. “I’m a boy—a boy in my heart and in my brain.” [End of quotation from Amazon]
This intentional mutilating of the minds of precious young children to lead them to perhaps even mutilate their own bodies, akin to the perverse photos in Boom Boom Bathory on Facebook, is what is happening in Sanford. The police of the city of Sanford, though present, nevertheless chose to not intervene or investigate. They are literally trying to “trans our kids”, and some have said they are trying to “change this whole damn town” of Sanford with their LGBTQ+ agenda. My understanding is funds from the tickets sold for this child drag story hour on Sunday went to the LGBTQ+ youth center here in Sanford. Their agenda is not hidden, but open and public.
In light of all this, I desire to see ordinances and/or law enforcement that forbids and stops drag queen performances (and other similar performers whether they call themselves drag queens or not) of all sorts in the city, county, and state, and any and all similar blurring of the image of God as male and female, for the well-being of child and adult alike, but especially to protect children from being exposed to such sexual deviancy at an impressionable and tender age, when their own minds and bodies are not yet fully developed. To tolerate and permit evil is evil. To allow such lewd, criminal behavior is criminal. The local magistrates and legislatures are called by God and the laws of this country, state, city, and county, to punish evil and uphold that which is good, as defined by the Triune God of Scripture (Romans 13:1-7).
You know, maybe if you feel the need to hide your face when you’re speaking, then the thing you’re saying is something you shouldn’t be saying.
The pastor writing this did not hide his face, he clearly states that the masked people showed up on their own.
Well he is the pied piper to the masked nazis, isn’t he? How godly is that?
Is the person in the green shirt without the mask holding a soft drink bottle one of the Drag Queens?
“Is the person in the green shirt without the mask holding a soft drink bottle one of the Drag Queens?” – Shameful.
If you don’t like drag, don’t go. I think gun shows are stupid. I don’t go. It’s so simple.
See the guy wearing the Einsatzkommando shirt? The slogan on it comes from the Norwegian Death Metal band Burzum founded by a guy calling himself Varg who was such a “Death Metal” fanatic (death Metal being just a thing that someone he knew made up) that he thought, to prove how hard-core he was, he should burn beautiful historic churches and kill people. So he did. Now he sells Nazi-themed shirts like that, because doing so is evil, and he wants to do evil things. Kind of like harassing and threatening people at a local yoga center just because you can.
See the guy wearing the Einsatzkommando shirt? The slogan on it comes from the Norwegian Death Metal band Burzum founded by a guy calling himself Varg who was such a “Death Metal” fanatic (death Metal being just a thing that someone he knew made up) that he thought, to prove how hard-core he was, he should burn beautiful historic churches and kill people. So he did. Now he sells Nazi-themed shirts like that, because doing so is evil, and he wants to do evil things. Kind of like harassing and threatening people at a local yoga center just because one can.
Sorry about the multi-post. The website was giving me some issues, and I can’t find a way to delete the multiples.
No worries..you’re talking out of your ratty wig and fake tits anyway.
Once again, this is an event that was publicly known and was not being conducted on public property. Parents of the children were present and anyone could attend if they wanted to. It is irrelevant if you find these events immoral or not. It is not illegal, it is not in secret, the children are present with their parents permission and in attendance. These are the hazards of a free society. I choose dangerous freedom over safe tyranny. All of those calling for these events to be banned really better think long and hard about what you are asking for. Anything you push against these events may one day be used against you. That’s right what is immoral one day may be moral the next and visa versa. How about you let parents actually parent their children in a manner they see fit. You may not agree with it, that doesn’t make you right. Growing up in the 70’s many criticized my mother for raising us Catholic, imagine if they tried to get the city and county officials to ban our Catholic services. If you are so concerned about these children, then pray for them, pray for their parents. You either support a free citizens rights or you don’t.
Good for that Preacher. Spreading the Gospel to Nazi’s, Feds and the Pedos.
But why the ACU top and confederate flag costume? Lol